While we all love our instant messengers, WhatsApp seems to be the current favourite in India. A good testimony to that is the billions of messages sent on New Year’s causing a major meltdown of the servers.

On the phone, it is a great app, but every now and then one feels the need for a larger screen. WhatsApp is clearly aware of that and has created a version for most web browsers and even desktop editions for Mac and Windows.

This, however, leaves out the folks with iPads. I’m not sure if this is an Apple thing or a WhatsApp thing, but it sure would be nice to get a working WhatsApp on the iPad.

In the meantime, here’s a simple hack. It requires you to have a phone with WhatsApp running on it and it makes use of the phone just like the web version does. The problem is when you open web.whatsapp.com on the iPad it just takes you to their main site.

The trick around this is to get the iPad to show you the “desktop” site instead of the mobile/iPad site. From the menu on the top right, select “Request Desktop Site”.

You should now get the familiar screen with the QR code to be scanned by the phone.

The rest of the process is pretty much the same as you would use for a desktop browser. Use the app on the phone to scan the QR code and you should be all set.

Enjoy the goodness of a large screen, till Apple or WhatsApp or both release an app for the iPad. In the meantime, don’t blame me for wasting more time on it.

Update: One of the reasons I wrote this post was the impending launch of WhatsApp for Business. I assumed that with India and Brazil both being big consumers of WhatsApp, they would actually launch the product in these markets first. Well, they did launch, but not yet in India. Hoping it happens soon.

Cheers…Kishore
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